Making Europe White… Again

Zygmunt Bauman, the renowned Polish sociologist, calls them the emergent precariat.Shaken by the false promises of global neoliberal capitalism, the emergent precariat is a significant class of white Europeans living in constant fear of losing their positions of privilege.

Their lives are characterized by a sense that they are in a constant state of crisis – the death of multiculturalism, the moral panic about terrorism, the collapse of the European Union and continued European economic paralysis. The global crisis of 2008, in particular, rapidly expanded and intensified their anxieties. Stalked by these, and material precarity, refugees and migrants have become the embodiment of their greatest fears – a change in a nation’s color and the real specter of economic meltdown in Europe.

Against this growing “influx” and increasing visibility of non-Europeans, right-wing populist politicians, aided by the moral panic induced by mainstream western media, appear to be urgently summoning the emergent precariat to defend their “ancestral lands” against threatening “hordes” of migrants.

The words of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy to “bring back authority and defend the French Republic,” (to kick start a failed second presidential bid), are eerily similar to those as say President-elect Donald Trump’s to “make America great again,” and as geographically proximate as Geert Wilders of the Netherlands who summons the Dutch to make the “Netherlands OursAgain.” Indeed, much of this rhetoric is about the restoration of economic nationalism and a purported disdain for the nefarious political elites in Brussels and Washington.

But there is something more sinister at work. The true power of this ideological production is not dictated by what is really said but rather by what is omitted. Both in Europe and the United States, there is a nostalgia for when Europe and the U.S. were whiter – a supposed return to former glory and greatness – and an accompanying fear that particular migrants are rapidly diluting the whiteness of their countries.

Central to this rhetoric, is a coded racial grammar directed largely at Arab and or Muslim and Black Africans.By using the phrases “ours” and “bring back,” while simultaneously omitting any references to race, they are tacitly signaling the idea that Europe excludes those historically categorized as non-European; those that are not white. In the case of America, making it “great again” is a direct reference to eight years of leadership under a black president, whose birthplace was relentlessly questioned by Trump.

These leaders are communicating that even if you are indeed here, you don’t really or fully belong. Your sojourn is temporary, you may even be “born in, but [are] not of [this] society” as critical theorist David Theo Goldberg reminds us. Sarkozy, in a speech to launch his re-entry into French politics indicated precisely this: “Being French means having a language, a history, and a way of life in common.” And in specific reference to public contentions about the burqini (the bathing suit worn by many Muslim women): “People cannot say ‘I want to be French, but in my own way’.”

Here we see rhetorical strategies that continue to support “national fantasies” and reinforce the characterization of migrant populations as deeply suspect and potentially disloyal; this manifest in their apparent unwillingness to integrate as prescribed by French authorities. Sarkozy went on to note: “Wearing a burqini is a radical, political gesture, a provocation… the women who are choosing to wear it are testing the resilience of the Republic.”

Crucially, this kind of rhetoric invokes violent cultural induction, internal boundary making and the expansion of illegality. Earlier this year, we saw French Muslim women interrogated by French police for wearing burqinis on the beach. In the pursuit of apparently sustaining secularism, French authorities remain steadfastly opposed to veiling, to the point of dramatically curtailing otherwise “benign liberties of self-expression”.

In Germany, Frauke Petry, the leader of the AfD – Germany’s Far Right party – in April of this year demanded that headscarves be banned in schools and universities and minarets prohibited. Succumbing to this pressure, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Interior Minister calledfor a partial ban on burkas in a range of public contexts, noting that it would apply in “places where it is necessary for our societies to coexistence.”